If the idea of experimental or innovative short stories makes you squirm, even though you are simultaneously bored with more traditional structure, Not Anyone’s Anything belongs on your bookshelf. Ian Williams puts relationships at the core of his work and this fiction collection exhibits this tendency as well. I also
The first volume of his Toronto trilogy introduces readers to Bernice Leach, who has left Barbados to work in Toronto as a housekeeper in an upscale neighbourhood in the 1960s. She has left behind a son and his father, as well as a mother and a sister, and she is
I pulled André Alexis' Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994) off my shelf when Fifteen Dogs was nominated for the Toronto Book Award (since then, FD has also been nominated for the Giller Prize and the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Award). There aren't any notable four-legged characters, but the collection is fascinating.
From my discovery of Neil Bantock's Griffin and Sabine books, I have sought out books that play with form. (Even earlier, I fell hard for Anastasia Krupnik's To-Do lists which appeared as handwritten notes on lined paper in Lois Lowry's books.) Recently, Kim Belair's and Ariadne MacGillivray's Pure Steele (2013) struck
Because I love making reading lists almost as much as I love reading the books that I add to them, I have big plans for my MustReadEverything Reading Projects, but then there are dozens of other books that I also want to read. This year so far, I have reread seven
